It's hard to imagine a more tranquil place than Gaza: farmers taking their produce to market, women and children standing patiently at bus stops, towns crowded with shoppers, and along the almost empty sandy beaches no sound to disturb the stillness except the thunder of surf.

This is the "other Gaza", the province of Mozambique that stretches north of the capital Maputo and was once the seat of an ancient African kingdom that resisted Portuguese colonial rule until 1897. In spite of today's calm, the area knew horror not long ago, as the occasional sight of ruined schools and burnt-out health clinics along the main north-south road makes clear. Until a nationwide peace deal was reached in 1992, Gaza was racked by a civil war that ravaged most of the country's small towns and villages.

Nelson Mandela's signature policy of "reconciliation" in South Africa is well known. Mozambique has been through a more impressive process of forgetting old wounds, but its success is ignored almost everywhere. The trauma here was perhaps more painful since, unlike apartheid which was based on deep political differences, the war was artificially instigated. It also took more people's lives. Thousands died, yet those who orchestrated or carried out the killing have been amnestied.

In its dying years the racist Smith regime in Rhodesia organised, paid and armed a phoney guerrilla movement to oppose Mozambique's independent government, Frelimo. Because of Frelimo's mistakes the new movement gained some support, but it would have disappeared if Lord Soames – the last British overlord of Rhodesia – had sought to disband it, rather than allow South Africa's apartheid government and intelligence services to take control when Rhodesia became independent Zimbabwe in 1980.

Few of today's tourists, mainly affluent white Afrikaners from South Africa, who build holiday homes on the dunes above Gaza's beaches , have any idea what their government did here less than 20 years ago. Apartheid's rulers used airdrops and mini-submarines to expand the rebels' reach by arming and supplying them all along the coast, where South African divers now plunge to watch fish.

Captured documents showed how South African instructors advised Renamo, the rebel movement, to avoid military clashes with Frelimo but to destroy schools and clinics and kill tribal headmen. The war ravaged Mozambique until 1992, when Frelimo was persuaded to do a deal with Renamo and let them compete in elections that gave them a sizeable chunk of seats in parliament. "Renamo actually won the low intensity conflict. Reconciliation was harder than in South Africa because Frelimo had to sit down with killers", says Joseph Hanlon, who runs the Mozambique Political Process Bulletin, the best English-language news source for the country.

"Here we've had reconciliation but no truth," says Malangatana Ngwenya, the country's brilliant painter and poet. When I first visited his Maputo studio in 1975, his pictures were barely known outside Mozambique, but they already contained the nightmarish mixture of staring human, animal, and fish-like heads that have since been exhibited in Europe, New York, and other countries in Africa. Their disturbing images reflected the 11-year war for independence. During the even more bitter civil war in which his brother and other family members were murdered by Renamo gunmen in his home village, only 30 miles from the capital, the reds and browns on Malangatana's canvases became darker and gloomier, his crowded tableaux more Brueghel-like. "There was no way to close my eyes, and not see what was happening to my country. I'm not provoking. I'm just painting history," he says. Yet, now the war is over, he is remarkably free of resentment.

"Everyone knows who was who politically," Malangatana declares. "If we had had a truth commission, it would just have caused tension. I don't want to know who killed my family. It would be stupid to know. And even if by chance I learned who took my brother's life, I wouldn't waste time on starting to hate. We could go on digging and digging, but it was part of the war." He uses a farmer's metaphor: "Grass grows up to feed the sheep and cattle. Sometimes it is consumed by fire, but I'm just happy to see new grass growing in its place."

One reason why the civil war no longer stirs much emotion – besides the fact that half the population is too young to have known it – is that Renamo has emphatically lost the peace. Mozambicans voted last month in elections that went totally uncovered by the British press, and were barely registered even in South Africa next door.

Armando Guebuza, Frelimo's businessman-president, won re-election with 75% of the vote, while Renamo dropped to 16%, its worst result ever. There was evidence of ballot-stuffing in favour of Frelimo and other irregularities, and this week Renamo announced it would boycott parliament in protest. But EU observers pronounced the poll broadly free and fair.

In the last decade and a half, Mozambique has changed economic course, embracing neoliberal policies under World Bank and IMF pressure, and seeking western investment. It joined the Commonwealth, the first country to do so that is not a former British colony.

Although it remains the world's ninth poorest country with a per capita income in 2008 of only $770, Mozambicans seem more relaxed than many other Africans, according to long-time residents and foreign observers. The mood affects current as well as past politics. "This news agency wouldn't be possible in Angola or Zimbabwe," says Hanlon.

His view is reinforced by the calm way the civil war has been consigned to the past. Renamo's first leader, Afonso Dhlakama, remains in politics and no one minds. As a member of a government-appointed advisory committee of senior Mozambicans, Malangatana occasionally sees him. "I've sat with him. We talk, and I don't feel any anger," he says.